Word: mermaids
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...head of the family, is a canny millionaire-in-the-making and a guilt-ridden lecher who loses successive mistresses to his wife's beagle-eyed sleuthing. Dave cannot stand the pompous Philistinism of Frank and his circle, gravitates toward Parkman's lower depths, a kind of Mermaid Tavern setting where the young toughs drink, brawl and frolic with the "pigs" who work at the brassiere factory. The arbiter of this elegant bunch is 'Bama Dillert, a gambler without a river boat. 'Bama is a cool autocrat of the poker table, and Dave Hirsh shortly becomes...
...Ligne is about to turn the dread corner of 40 into middle age, accompanied by his faithful ulcer, which bites so vigorously at the wrong moments that it almost assumes the lifelikeness of a pet. Like careful Prufrock ("Do I dare to eat a peach?"), he has heard the mermaids singing each to each. The particular blonde mermaid who obsesses him is a girl only glimpsed behind a window. For Matthew Ligne spends most of his time observing the creatures-married couples, tree surgeons, enterprising alley cats-in the little closed-in world of his backyard. As he watches...
There remains the Lillie. In the circumstances, it is clearly no accident that she is at her best when she speaks not a word; for lamentable are many of the words she has to speak, or-worse yet-to trill. Indeed, that chill stare of hers, suggesting an insulted mermaid, that disdainful glide, as of a sneering sleepwalker, might very well be addressed to her material. Even when shackled by it, she manages at moments to shake herself magically free; the grande dame lurches, the veiled maiden loops, culture splinters into anarchy. There are scattered glories with Actress Lillie...
...philosophic truths with a succession of Polonius-like truisms, an occasional feeling for language with pretentious and barbarous misuse of it. A good cast of actors, including Claude Rains, Christopher Plummer and Wendell Corey, were unhappily squandered on a pudding of a script-part scientific jargon, part Mermaid Tavern verse, part Madison Avenue prose-that sounded like cosmic advertising copy...
...Singapore in 1942. Four of the ship's survivors lived 14 weeks on a raft; they knew each other only by nicknames. One, "Biscuit," was an Irish bartender; another, "Bulldog," a sahib type. "Number Four" was the ship's purser, a one-legged mulatto. "Sea-Wyf" (mermaid) was a handsome young woman of mystery, and much of the story concerns her saintly attempts to impose decency on the three men, although thirst, storms, submarines and rat-infested atolls worked to turn them into cowards and murderers...